


The Bespoke Ghost

by Aproclivity



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/M, Ghost!Richard Strand, Strand's gotta Strand, Thomas Warren is fucking the worst always, alex reagan is actually good at her job, canon levels of bad decision making, ghost au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 15:42:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22498516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aproclivity/pseuds/Aproclivity
Summary: Six months after Richard Strand suddenly dies just before Alex Reagan has the chance to interview him, Thomas Warren comes to her with an offer that she can't refuse: spend 30 days in a haunted house and at the end it belongs to her plus unfettered access for every day that you do it. With lagging ratings on her current show, it's too good of a chance for Alex to miss it even if it does set off warning bells. But when has she ever had a sense of self preservation anyway?What Alex doesn't know is that the ghost who is haunting the house is Richard Strand himself.
Relationships: Alex Reagan & Nic Silver, Alex Reagan/Richard Strand, Alex Reagan/Thomas Warren (you read that right.)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	The Bespoke Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> So when I was doing the 12 days prompts, this prompt came up and it was ultimately too good to miss: _Richard is a ghost who falls in love with Alex, but Alex can't see them. Does Richard do anything to make Alex notice them?_ But decided that 'Major Character Death' wasn't exactly a cheerful Christmas tag. So, I stopped working on the story for a while, but picked it up again. 
> 
> And no, I'm not kidding about that relationship tag, but then again it's probably not going to go how you expect there.

There are certain places in his life where Dr. Richard Strand, president and founder of the Strand Institute never ended up finding himself. The first of course was his father’s house in Seattle. For all of his adult life, Strand had eschewed anything that had to do with Howard Strand, his work or his legacy. Even after Coralee had went missing and Charlie had left, Richard stayed in Chicago taking his father’s bequest and turning into something that Richard has always expected that Howard would have probably hated: a place that was entirely bent on tearing down the work that his father had been doing and everything that he’d ever believed in about ghosts or the paranormal. But yet here he was in an old Victorian house in Seattle, prowling along its dusty halls with its dust cloth covered furniture. In every way it was what one would expect from a haunted house, which led to the second place that Richard Strand had never expected to find himself in the position of. 

Richard Strand himself had apparently taken up residence as the house’s bespoke ghost. 

His passing, he assumed was very quick: one moment he was waiting to receive perhaps the most annoying reporter that he’d dealt with in his twenty years of annoying reporters and the next he was waking up here in Howard Strand’s house in Howard Strand’s bed. Thankfully for Richard the only small favor had come in the form of the fact that his father himself wasn’t also a resident of the house at First Drive. 

Time runs oddly when one is a ghost and your father can’t be fucking bothered to have the deceny to make certain that the clocks always worked (Richard can’t be bothered to take the blame for this—it’s his father’s fault just like everything else) and he’s sitting in the study reading one of Howard’s books for what seems like the hundredth time when he hears the unmistakable creak of a front door opening. One thing that Richard is aware of is the fact that he’s been dead long enough to master some of the tricks that are always ascribed to ghosts, and he wills himself into the foyer to see who the hell would dare intrude on his solitude—if he needs to be dead then he’s damned well not going to also suffer the living! 

Two people enter, a man and a woman both in their early thirties. Between the two of them they’re carrying a not unfamiliar amount of equipment and the cases are familiar as well. _Ghost hunters. Of course they’d be fucking ghost hunters_. Irritation and anger flood through Richard and he’s self aware enough to wonder if this was what other ghosts had felt like when he’d been the one to bother them!

“You know Alex, I still don’t like it. I mean Warren could have taken this challenge to anyone. Why you?”

“You heard the same thing I did, Nic.” The voice that speaks is familiar, achingly so, and it’s definitely as compelling as it was when he’d first received those eleven calls from her. Richard had been trying to avoid those calls just because the woman’s voice was so damned compelling. And now for the first time, he can hear it washing over him in person, and he just lets out a small sigh. Alex Reagan frowns for a moment, and she turns to the blond man next to her. “Did you just hear something?” 

“Nope. Just normal house stuff? Why? Did you? You’re not letting this place creep you out already, are you?” The teasing in the man’s ( _Nic’s_ ) voice is palpable, and Richard feels something start to strangle in his throat which is a feat considering that he no longer has any need to _breathe_. Oh, that’s an intense jealousy that he’s not entirely sure where it’s coming from, but when Alex playfully bumps the man’s shoulder and grins he swears that he can almost feel his heart beating again. 

“Shut up, you’ve been my friend for long enough to know that ghosts don’t scare me. Just demons.” Richard just snorts, because while he may be a ghost there is no way that demons are real. “But anyway, back to what I was saying. You heard what I did, that Thomas Warren was impressed with the ghost hunting episode we did, and that he thought of me immediately when it came to this challenge that was set.”

“Still. Thirty days in an alleged haunted house, Alex. I mean. The power’s on at least, and there’s supposed to be internet and there’s going to be delivery whenever you want it, but if you set foot off the porch it’s over? You lose the house and the interview? It seems stacked against you, Alex.”

“The house is fine. I’m going to be recording every day and besides, it’s October. It’s not like we had a whole lot of other ideas for it. I mean our ratings are sort of down the drain, they’re gonna pull us back to producing for radio. I think _The Strand House Podcast_ could be a huge deal for us. And that’s not mentioning unfettered access to Thomas Warren for every day that I do it.”

Strand was aghast. Thirty days with this annoying and fascinating reporter. But more than that. It couldn’t have been October, not when it had just been May that he died, but here this reporter was talking with her producer about Halloween. Not only were the two of them talking about Halloween, but a podcast in his house. He knows what a podcast is (it’s impossible to have Ruby Carver as an assistant and not know what it is) but he can’t imagine it’d be very interesting to hear a reporter staying at a haunted house for a month, especially when the ghost in question was going to entirely refuse to engage with anything that this woman has to say. 

Willing himself back into the study, he finds that he can’t move. At least not that way, no it’s like it was when he’d started being a ghost and he’d needed to rely on his brains muscle memory of picking up his feet and moving that way. But the two of them are still talking. Maybe, he thinks as he watches her put things down on the couch, he should keep listening. Besides, he’s already read that book cover to cover more times than he can count. 

“You know what they say about things being too good to be true though, Alex. And I have to wonder what Warren’s motivation is in all of this.” This Nic’s voice has a note in it that clearly Alex doesn’t like as she straightens her back. 

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Strand is a man who was married for fifteen years, and he knows that tone of voice. Clearly Nic does as well from the way that he spreads his hands. 

“Look Alex, we both know that you’re attractive and that you’d have chemistry with a garbage can. You can’t deny how attractive Warren is. How did you describe him to me? Ridiculously attractive? Super sexy James Bond? Besides, I was there. He was definitely flirting with you, Alex.”

The woman’s ears match her coat. “Jesus Nic, I’m not going into this to have sex with him! I would never sleep with a source. Besides, Thomas Warren is a multi billionaire, it's not like he needs to seduce reporters. He could be dating like supermodels and stuff not annoying journalists. I think you’re way off base here.”

“Maybe,” the word is hummed. “But I still think that you should be careful. We still don’t know very much about him. And I don’t like that part of this whole thing is spending the nights here by yourself.”

There’s something about that which Richard agrees with, but whether or not it’s because of this Warren person or because of just not wanting to have this woman here every night he honestly can’t say. 

“I’m fine, _Dad_. I’ve got mace and you know my dad has been teaching me self defense since I was ten. If Warren is planning something _untoward_ then I’ll get the hell out of here and that’ll be the story.”

“‘Untoward’, Alex? Really?” The humor in Nic’s voice is undeniable. “Did we take a step back into a Victorian novel now?”

Alex just laughs, and Richard does too, but only she responds. “Shut up. Besides it kinda fits the atmosphere, though, right? I mean definitely very Victorian haunted house. Kind of reminds me of Clue.”

“Well, here’s hoping that we don’t add a murder mystery on top of everything else we’ve got going here. I mean, you and police stations…”

Alex laughs, and Richard finds himself thinking just how much he likes the sound. More than that, it makes him feel alive in a way that few things have since his untimely death. It’s almost like having a pulse for those few seconds. “Come on Nic that was _one time_. And everyone got arrested then. It was a protest!”

“Still.” But the words are softened by the grin on Nic’s face. “Just do me a favor as your friend: keep your phone on you and charged all the time, okay? Just in case?”

“When have you ever known me to not have my phone on me, Nicodemus?”

“Good point. But as your boss make sure you’ve got a recorder going. You know how to use all of this ghost equipment?”

“Yep! And if i forget I promise I’ll call. Really Nic, I’m gonna be fine. I’m practically in my own backyard. And you’re just a phone call away.”

“Okay. Just.” Nic looks like he wants to say more, but instead she just hugs him. “Get good audio?”

“Don’t I always? Come on, I’ll walk you out. My last dose of freedom for thirty days.”

Richard doesn’t bother to follow them out to the door for their goodbyes, instead he just moves to the couch to look at the equipment that she’s gotten with her. It’s standard sort of quality, definitely not as good as the things that the Institute would have had, but better than what he expected for a journalist. Honestly he can’t help but to wonder if she’s put together the name with the paranormal investigator who had died before their meeting. Strand isn’t exactly uncommon, but it’s still a curious coincidence that this is _the_ haunted house that Alex Reagan has been sent to by whoever this Thomas Warren was. 

“So I’m alone for the first time in the Strand house,” Richard can hear the story in Alex’s voice even as she comes into the living room. “You can tell that this was once a very grand place. Even now that it’s fallen into disrepair there’s a beauty about it, but an abandoned one. It’s not hard to imagine Miss Havisham standing in her rotting wedding dress at the top of the stairs in the grand foyer, or the Woman in White looking plaintively out of the window. 

“But there is no tragic feminine figure here, at least not that I’ve been able to find through my research. The house’s owner, prior to Thomas Warren-- the elusive billionaire who charged me with this task is-- a man who I know the work of fairly well. Indeed when I started doing my research for the first episode of our other show: _Where Life Leads You_ about interesting people doing interesting jobs—which if you didn’t listen to don’t worry because no one else did either—which examines the fascinating world of paranormal investigation…”

Alex just trails off for a moment, and Richard just watches her shrewdly for a moment. Was she here to undo his life’s work?! Was that the point of all of this?! But she’s speaking again with a sigh. 

“Yeah I know Nic, I’ll cut that in post. Where was I? Anyway. Going back on the record. One name kept popping up over and over: Dr. Richard Strand of The Strand Institute. You may not have heard of his name, but you’d probably heard of his offer: one million dollars for actual proof of the supernatural. Dr. Strand didn’t believe in the supernatural or ghosts or any of this stuff, so of course I tried to interview him about it. It took some work to get him to agree to the interview—I had called him eleven times and ended up visiting his publisher before he’d akquised to it—but unfortunately for me Dr. Strand had died unexpectedly of a heart attack just a few hours before I was supposed to meet with him for an interview.”

Alex just pauses, and she loses some of the storytelling aspects of her voice when she continues. “You know, I would have liked to have met him. I kind of feel like I was supposed to have met him. Like since I had first heard his name. But then, well, I guess I was wrong.” 

A ghost, with no nerve endings carrying signals to his brain, should absolutely not feel cold, Richard decided. It’s not fair, because there’s nothing that he can do to counter the chill that works itself into his consciousness at the moment. Honestly, he’s just glad at Alex Reagan can’t see him (or that he can’t see himself) because he is reasonably certain that at this moment were he to have a physical form, his mouth would simply be hanging open. What she says echoes throughout him, ringing in a way that it really shouldn’t. That was one of the reasons that Richard had been so intent on avoiding this woman’s phone calls before: that he felt like he was supposed to answer them too. That he was supposed to meet this tiny, pretty journalist with a stubborn streak a mile wide. 

Richard Strand was never very good at doing things that he was _supposed_ to do. 

But he follows along behind her, listening as Alex keeps speaking into the microphone, her storytelling voice once more fixed into place. It’s just as much of a mask and armor as his suits were, he realizes but what she says next doesn’t give Richard time to dwell on it. 

“From what I can tell, Dr. Strand never came here, or even that he’d come to Seattle. Instead once his father’s will had gone through probate the Strand Institute dutifully paid taxes every year but didn’t do very much else. There was no caretaker, no one ever cut the grass beyond the fence line that wraps around the front of the house, and no one took care of the interior at all. The utilities were paid, but it’s easy to imagine that even that was only done so that on those very rare cold days in Seattle those pipes didn’t burst. 

“Dr. Strand’s father, Howard, died in an accident outside of Halluh, Iraq in 1997. He was an antiquities dealer who was working on a dig that was supposed to be a predevelopment dig. A predevelopment dig is when they’re going to be building something and are concerned that they might run into antiquities and artifacts throughout the course of normal work. 

“However, when it comes to that, there’s normally a team of Iraqui archaeologists who specialize in that sort of thing. From what I can tell, though research _is_ spotty considering the aftermath of two wars and American Imperialism, is that this particular dig never utilized what is a fairly standard resource. Instead, the only expert that they’d brought in was Howard Strand, a man who as far as I can tell had no actual training in what he was meant to be an expert on. 

“But there are other things about that particular dig south of Baghdad that don’t add up. One is the expense involved in the dig. A normal predevelopment dig costs somewhere around a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand dollars in today’s money. This particular dig? According to the papers filed with the American government, the price tag was somewhere more in the cost of ten million dollars. More than that, following the death of Howard Strand, there’s no sign that the work had ever been completed. Looking at google maps of the area, updated in January of 2016, there is nothing at the coordinates for the dig. There’s nothing surrounding the site for fifteen square miles. Whatever The Marutuk Group was doing in Hallah, it definitely wasn’t building something.” 

Richard just groans, loudly and fully. Fuck, if there was anything that was going to be connected to this whole thing of course it was going to be his father’s obsession with The Horn of Fucking Tiamat. He’d had more than enough of it in his lifetime, and now here he was dead and with no escape, and it was showing up _again_. Anger fills him, and without thinking about it, Richard just reaches out to the nearest pile of his father’s papers and he shoves them over. He shoves them over and Alex Reagan has clearly heard and seen them falling. Fuck. 

“Okay, what the hell was that?!” Her voice is more annoyed than frightened, and that amuses Richard too, even as she comes close to him. Despite how he backed up against the wall, Alex Reagan brushes up against him as she kneels down to grab the papers, and from his vantage point, he can see the pale skin on her collarbone burst into goosebumps as she passes through him. 

As she stands shivering, gathering up the papers, Alex speaks again. “Okay that was definitely just a draft that knocked over some papers. I mean it makes sense considering how old this house is. And it’s cool there, so it must be coming in from the window.”

Strand knows that’s the rational thing to assume—it’s what _he_ would have said if someone had come to him with it as some sort of haunting. Richard doesn’t believe in heaven, hell or purgatory but he has to wonder if this is some sort of karmic payback for what he’d done with his life. But he can’t help but be disappointed that this woman hadn’t immediately jumped to more paranormal reasonings for it considering it was his fault. It’s almost a matter of _pride_ for him at this point!

But Richard’s brooding and Alex’s looking through the papers is cut short by a firm knock on the door that startled both of them. When he follows behind Alex, Richard expects to see her friend Nic at the door. He’s more than slightly disgruntled to see the way that she doesn’t bother to look through the peephole before she opens it. Doesn’t she know that’s not a safe thing to do?

His disgruntled state only grows when he realizes that there’s a man standing on the stoop holding a large and obviously expensive bouquet of flowers in bright and happy colors—colors he already associates with Alex Reagan. 

“I thought that you could use something to brighten this place up considering how dark it is.” The voice is familiar to Richard—he’s heard it before. In his dreams mostly but now he realizes that he’s heard it more recently and in the waking world. It had been on the phone call that he’d received right before there had been the tightness in his chest and the world had exploded into white. 

“Mr. Warren!” Alex’s voice is warm and bright in ways that Strand hadn’t heard it before. “You really didn’t have to do that. And I really didn’t expect to see you here. I know how busy you are.”

“Yes, well, I thought I would see how our deal was progressing. You’re doing me a favor proving that this house isn’t haunted. May I come in?” 

“Yes, of course. Here let me take those. They’re beautiful and my favorite! How did you know?” 

“Well, I didn’t,” Warren’s tone is jovial and it makes Richard want to punch him in the face. “But they reminded me of you, so I brought them along.” 

As the two of them step into the foyer and close the door behind them, Alex is pink, and she is looking down and smelling the flowers. Richard, however, is entirely focused on the man who had brought them. He’d met this man before, which was impossible because he looks exactly the same as he did when Richard was still Richie, and just a few days after he’d opened the door to let the shadows inside. And for an unnerving moment, this impossible man almost seems to be _looking directly at him_ before his attention is returned to Alex. 

There is no way in hell that Warren can be the same as he was that day, but here he is, flirting with Alex Reagan like he’s younger than Richard was when he passed. 

Suddenly, the bouquet of flowers in Alex’s hands almost seems to explode, and she lets out a sharp gasp as glass flies all over her. Thomas Warren is taller than she is, and she can’t see the look on his face as he most definitely stares at where Richard is and smiles in a way that is both a dare and a welcome.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are love.


End file.
